ferred to one’s friend;” the other is the passage at the end of the ‘Fallacies’ (which is a sort of appendix to the ‘Topics’), where he refers to his services to Dialectic. “In regard to the process of syllogising,” he says, “I found positively nothing said before me: I had to work it out for myself by long and laborious research.”
The discovery of the structure of the syllogism—that is to say, of the forms in which men do, and must, reason about a great many things in life, was of course very useful for dialectical purposes, both for exposing fallacy in others and for keeping one’s self straight in controversy. But Aristotle, while in the course of writing his treatise on Dialectic, seems to have been impressed with the independent importance of the theory of the Syllogism, and of the necessity for a simple, unapplied Logic. So, after completing seven books of his ‘Topics,’ he dropped the subject, and went on to write his first and second series of ‘Analytics;’ and it was only after he had finished these two great works that he returned to complete the ‘Topics,’ by the addition of an eighth book.
The ‘Topics,’ as their name implies, are the books “treating of places,” and “places” are seats of arguments, or matters in which arguments may be found. Aristotle in a long course of observation and analysis had apparently noted down the heads of reasonings most likely to be available for either attack or defence in dialectical controversy, and he here sets these forth in seven books. His object is to educate the reader to be a skilful dialectician in Athenian arenas. He names the four chief instruments for this purpose: 1st, To
